“Excellence! I heard in the town that you were at the inn. I would like speech with you, but I must not be seen. Will you follow me?”
Even in his surprise, Gordon felt an instant’s wonder. He himself had not yet entered the osteria. How had the other heard of his presence? The wonder, however, was lost in the thought of Teresa.
He turned from the inn and followed the figure silently through the falling shadows.
CHAPTER XXXIV
TITA INTERVENES
Under the trees, as Gordon listened to the gondolier, the night grew deeper. The moonlight that mellowed over the pine forests spectrally outspread, the burnished river and the town before them, misted each hedge and tree with silver. A troubadour nightingale bubbled in the middle distance from some palazzo garden and from the nearer osteria came sounds of bustle. Through all breathed the intimate soft wind of the south bearing the smell of lime-blossoms and of sleeping bean-fields.
Wonder at Tita’s appearance had melted into a great wave of gladness that swept him at the sudden knowledge that she, Teresa, was there in Ravenna near him, mistress of Casa Guiccioli, whose very portal he had passed that afternoon. But the joy had died speedily; thereafter every word had seemed to burn itself into his heart.
“If he hated her, why did he wish to make her his contessa? Tell me that, Excellence! It has been so all these weeks, ever since her wedding. Sometimes I have heard him sneer at her—always about you, Excellence—how he knew she ever saw you I cannot tell! His servants go spying—spying, always when she is out of the casa.”
The man who listened turned his head with a movement of physical pain, as Tita went on, resentfully:
“And she is a Gamba, born to be a great lady! If she left him, he would bring her back, unless she went from Italy. And who is to help her do that? Her brother is in another land. Her father is sick and she will not tell him anything. There is none but me in Casa Guiccioli who does not serve the signore too well! I thought—” he finished, twisting his red cap in his great fingers, “I thought—if I told you—you would take her away from him, to your own country, maybe.”
Gordon almost smiled in his anguish. To the simple soul of this loyal servant, on whom conventional morals sat with Italian lightness, here was an uncomplex solution! Turn household highwayman and fly from the states of the Church to enjoy the plunder! And of all places—to England! Open a new domestic chapter in some provincial British country-side as “Mr. Smith,” perhaps, “a worthy retired merchant of Lima!” The bitter humor couched in the fancy made sharper his pang of utter impotence. Italy was not England, he thought grimly. In that very difference had lain ship-wreck for them both. Teresa could not leave her husband openly, as Annabel had left him! The Church of Rome knew no divorce, and inside its bond only a papal decree could give her the right to live apart from her husband under her own father’s roof.